Kathy Willens/Associated Press Phil Hughes was put on the 15-day disabled list Friday.
Phil Hughes, whose 2011 season has consisted of three disastrous starts and a rub-your-eyes-in-disbelief 13.94 earned run average, was put on the 15-day disabled list Friday. Yankees Manager Joe Girardi declared that Hughes, a 25-year-old right-hander, was going through a “dead-arm period.’’
That expression is normally used to describe pitchers who hit a lull during spring training and less commonly heard when the season begins. But the Yankees continue to maintain that Hughes is not injured and do not seem to have another logical explanation why he has lost the oomph on his fastball.
Taking Hughes’s place in the starting rotation will be 37-year-old Bartolo Colon, who pitched three scoreless innings in relief of Hughes on Thursday night as the Yankees rallied from a five-run deficit to beat Baltimore, 6-5, in 10 innings.
Colon was scooped up by General Manager Brian Cashman in a minor league deal in the off-season to give the Yankees some added pitching options. He has an 0-1 record with a 3.97 E.R.A. over 11 1/3 innings.
Freddy Garcia, another veteran pitcher whom Cashman acquired with a minor league deal before spring training, will make his first start of 2011 on Saturday. That Garcia and Colon are together in the rotation underscores how tentative the Yankees’ starting pitching has become midway through the first month of the season.
At some point, Cashman will no doubt try to address the issue by acquiring a front-line starter from another team. Hughes’s struggles may quicken his efforts.
Loading Twitter messages...
Kepner, who had covered the Yankees for The Times since 2002, is in his second year as the national baseball reporter. He joined The Times in 2000 as the Mets beat writer. A native of Philadelphia and a graduate of Vanderbilt University, Kepner has also covered the Angels for the Riverside Press-Enterprise in California and the Mariners for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. He lives in Connecticut with his wife and their four children. 
Ben Shpigel is in his second year as the Yankees beat writer. He had covered the Mets for The Times since 2005. Before then, he was a staff writer for the Dallas Morning News for two years. He also worked at The News Journal in Wilmington, Del., and for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Shpigel received a bachelor's degree in English and journalism from Emory University and a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University. He and his wife, Rebecca, and their daughter, live in New Jersey. 
Belson covers the business of sports after many years of writing about the business of practically everything else for the Times, Business Week, Reuters and Bloomberg. During his 12 years living in Tokyo, he wrote about baseball, kick boxing, marathon running and football in Japan. Since returning to the United States, he managed to persuade his wife, who grew up near the Yomiuri Giants' old stadium, to find it in herself to root for the Mets.
Sablich has produced news and multimedia for The New York Times since July 2006 after earning a master’s degree in new media from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. He was born in Binghamton, N.Y. and resides in Queens. Sablich is still traumatized from his first trip to Yankee Stadium as a child when the Yankees starter Tim Leary was torched by the White Sox for 7 runs in one and two-thirds innings on Old-Timers' Day, July 15, 1990. 